Is saying "That's So Gay" discriminatory?

I searched around for a discussion on this topic, but I haven't found any. If this topic has already been started or if it's in the wrong category, feel free to delete this and refer me to the other one.

Being a teenager, I hear a lot of my peers and friends saying things such as "That's Gay" and "Don't be a Fag". I try not to comment when they say that, but I really do think that saying something like that should be on the same level as "That's so Black."

I think of it as them replacing the word "stupid" with "gay", so obviously when put in that light, it's a pretty bigoted and judgmental thing to say.

So what do you think, fellow Atheists? Especially the younger ones like me, who probably hear this stuff at school all the time. I just simply don't know what to think about it.

It wasn't that long ago that the term "gay" simply meant "happy". The Flintstones theme song said "We'll have a gay old time" and the Christmas song "Deck the Halls" has the line "Don we now our gay apparel". The word first began to be used by the homosexual community in the 1930s and didn't become associated with homosexuals by the general population until the late 1960s and 1970s.

Words can have multiple meanings and whether any offense is meant by it is really a matter of context. Someone could be completely in favor of equal rights for homosexuals and not have any negative feelings about homosexuals, but use the phrase "that's gay" as a colloquialism without any disrespect intended. Unless the term is directed at someone as an intended insult, I don't see a problem with it. I'm a "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" kind of guy though.

At the same time, I don't know what is like to have someone use a term that is intended as an insult towards my demographic. As a white, heterosexual male of English ancestry, I've never had someone call me something I found offensive to my heritage or to who I am as a person.

I can't swear to that, but that is what I heard. I think it is like a lot of words: we seldom know with absolute certainty when they first started being used in certain ways. This clip only indicates that an association between cross-dressing, homosexuality, and the word gay was quite possibly well known enough to pull off an allusion to gayness right in front of the censors. Similary, by the time a word makes it in print, it has usually already been in the spoken language for some time. In this film, it is probably used as an "inside joke."